4 ms·

I feel like this is a slippery slope. As with all neutrality, net neutrality means that for good or bad you can't prefer some traffic. Any zero-rated service is

I feel like this is a slippery slope. As with all neutrality, net neutrality means that for good or bad you can't prefer some traffic. Any zero-rated service is not neutral. You can't block Facebook from being zero rated but allow Wikipedia.

belorn 9y ago
Wikipedia is a non-profit and is thus distinctly different from Facebook. Non-profit organization enjoy many benefits like better taxes, but it's not seen as a slippery slope risk. The distinct line between for-profit and non-profit allows for some inequalities between organizations. You can give tax exemptions to Wikipedia but not Facebook. Why then not also zero rate Wikipedia but not Facebook?
- driverdan 9y ago
  Because there are plenty of bad non-profits.
- dingaling 9y ago
  > Wikipedia is a non-profit and is thus distinctly different from Facebook. At an operational level they're not much different; both rely on generation of revenue to cover costs and to compensate their permanent staff, and both can make profits which can be reinvested in the organisation or distributed as dividends or spent on 'stuff'. Essentially the only operational difference is that all of the non-profit's untaxed profits must originate from activities aligned with their primary stated function, whereas Facebook is free to earn from other unrelated business activities. Furthermore the officers of a non-profit can't dip into the profits for self-enrichment since the profits belong to the organisation ( hence untaxed ), but since they extract their remuneration upstream of the profits that's not a major issue.
johnnydoe9 9y ago
I think it's just a precautionary step after the whole Facebook debacle, FB issues an email address to every user and they were tricking people into sending emails to petition for their service with a click and then sending a notification to all their friends when a person does that making it look like a good thing. What made it even more iffy was that it would've been free on select few services and they planned to include a couple other companies later, it took a lot of convincing and explaining by a lot of concerned people. It was a scary time and no one wants to go through all of that again for whatever reason.
baq 9y ago
there aren't any true neutral services in the world as much as there aren't any truly neutral people. it's a matter of policy if encyclopedia access should be considered important enough to subsidize, and it's a matter of policy also if wikipedia should be considered an encyclopedia. (note that those two questions are orthogonal.) i'd rather wikipedia was subsidized, because otherwise the people who benefit the most from it have relatively more expensive access to it than the rest.

belorn 9y ago

Wikipedia is a non-profit and is thus distinctly different from Facebook. Non-profit organization enjoy many benefits like better taxes, but it's not seen as a slippery slope risk. The distinct line between for-profit and non-profit allows for some inequalities between organizations. You can give tax exemptions to Wikipedia but not Facebook. Why then not also zero rate Wikipedia but not Facebook?

driverdan 9y ago
Because there are plenty of bad non-profits.
dingaling 9y ago
> Wikipedia is a non-profit and is thus distinctly different from Facebook. At an operational level they're not much different; both rely on generation of revenue to cover costs and to compensate their permanent staff, and both can make profits which can be reinvested in the organisation or distributed as dividends or spent on 'stuff'. Essentially the only operational difference is that all of the non-profit's untaxed profits must originate from activities aligned with their primary stated function, whereas Facebook is free to earn from other unrelated business activities. Furthermore the officers of a non-profit can't dip into the profits for self-enrichment since the profits belong to the organisation ( hence untaxed ), but since they extract their remuneration upstream of the profits that's not a major issue.

johnnydoe9 9y ago

I think it's just a precautionary step after the whole Facebook debacle, FB issues an email address to every user and they were tricking people into sending emails to petition for their service with a click and then sending a notification to all their friends when a person does that making it look like a good thing. What made it even more iffy was that it would've been free on select few services and they planned to include a couple other companies later, it took a lot of convincing and explaining by a lot of concerned people. It was a scary time and no one wants to go through all of that again for whatever reason.

baq 9y ago

there aren't any true neutral services in the world as much as there aren't any truly neutral people. it's a matter of policy if encyclopedia access should be considered important enough to subsidize, and it's a matter of policy also if wikipedia should be considered an encyclopedia. (note that those two questions are orthogonal.) i'd rather wikipedia was subsidized, because otherwise the people who benefit the most from it have relatively more expensive access to it than the rest.